Receiving the award at the Gala Dinner which marks the end of Seawork's busy opening day, Triskel Marine MD Ken Wittamore said, 'We are amazed by the reaction to the Spirit of Innovation Award and overwhelmed by the positive response at the exhibition today.'

Tough, lightweight and easy to deploy, the DataBuoy is being used by Poole Harbour Commissioners to collect baseline environmental data and to monitor dredging operations in the commercial port area. The Commissioners have been operating one of the DataBuoys since March to establish turbidity, salinity and temperature in advance of dredging operations and installed a further two buoys before the dredging programme commenced in May in order to measure its impact.

Poole's port hydrographer Steve Pearce said, 'The simplicity of the buoys is what attracted us to them. A turbidity threshold can be set for each individual buoy directly from our office computer. If the threshold is exceeded, the buoy will automatically send a text message to the dredger skipper telling him to stop work. I get an email at the same time as a check. Once the turbidity falls through a second threshold, the skipper receives another message telling him that he can continue, confirmed by email to me.'

Poole's innovative dredging programme will involve routine removal of sediment from the commercial port area which will then be deposited back into the harbour in deep water near the narrow harbour entrance. Strong currents are expected to transport the material around to the north side of Brownsea Island and redeposit it in the shallows, helping to rebuild the wetland habitats.

Triskel Marine's DataBuoys are being used to constantly monitor the amount of sediment in the water either side of the dumping site in order to help the harbour engineers to assess the effectiveness of the plan.

Steve Pearce added, 'TML's have been extremely flexible in their approach and have modified their standard products to give us exactly what we wanted. We said we needed to be able to control the buoys from the office using a web interface and they designed precisely what we asked for. They have also produced interfaces to our exiting systems so the information from the buoys goes straight onto our main database.'

TML's Ken Wittamore concluded, 'We are absolutely delighted with the confidence that Poole have shown in us and our products. By focusing on low power, low weight and low cost, we have taken a completely different approach to dredge monitoring when compared to the much bulkier oceanographic type devices. Our buoys can be launched and recovered from a dinghy, allowing ports to be extremely flexible and responsive. Poole's testing and subsequent order vindicates the "small is beautiful" route.'